Let’s get our priorities right. Another American mass shooting. Yawn. A fresh Russian offensive in Ukraine. Yawn. The Heard vs Depp defamation case concludes with a $15 million payout to Johnny Depp. Wow. OMG. #justiceforjohnnydepp.

The Wednesday evening homepage of BBC.com reflected these priorities. Above the digital fold of this old mainstream media publication, there was much hoopla about Depp coming out “on top” in the Fairfax County courtroom. Buried beneath this noise, there was news about multiple murders at a medical facility in Tulsa as well as the latest Russian atrocities in eastern Ukraine.

Media prioritization of the trivial over the serious isn’t, of course, new. Neil Postman reminded us about it in Amusing Ourselves to Death, his 1984 Huxleyan polemic against the Brave New World narcotic of television. And the inanity of that narcotic reached what seemed, at the time at least, to be its climax in June 1994 with the LAPD car chase of O.J. Simpson, a real-time police celebrity drama raptly watched by 95 million television viewers.

But in June 1994, there was no social media—no Twitter, no YouTube, no TikTok. The O.J. Simpson soap opera was, in fact, an end rather than a beginning—one of the last mass-produced top-down dramas of the 20th century.

Almost thirty years later, we are in the early stage of something both quite familiar and very new—today’s social media age. Rather than the 1994 O.J. trial by networked television, we now have the 2022 Heard/Depp trial by TikTok.

We continue to amuse ourselves to death. But on a scale and in a form that might have even elicited an OMG from Neil Postman. In contrast to those 95 million network television viewers of the O.J. car chase, there are now, for example, over 18 billion views of TikTok videos simply featuring the hashtag #Justiceforjohnnydepp. And these billions of 21st-century social media users are radically more engaged than their 20th-century network television ancestors.

We need today’s TikTokers